The Background of Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. The Background of Study

English is one of the most popular languages in the world. It is used as an international communication. Thousand people from different countries and different mother tongues can communicate each other in English. No doubt, many people want to learn English in order that they can communicate spoken or written. English also has become one of important subject in Indonesian school. The department of education has decided that English as a foreign language has to be taught in Indonesian school. It has been taught in every level of learners. Even, it is delivered to the earlier learners; it is for the kindergarten students. Moreover, English may be obtained not only in formal education; in schools, but also in informal education. In learning English, there are four skills that should be mastered those are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Listening and reading are receptive skills while speaking and writing are productive skills. Among the four skills to be mastered by students above, writing is the most difficult and complicated language skills because to write clearly the writer should do and learn everything at once. Hairston stated that, “To write clearly you have to 2 pay attention to everything: audience, sentence structure, transition, choice of example and half dozen of other considerations. 1 The opinion above is supported by Raymond, “Writing is not easy. An experienced writer will often labor over a single paragraph for more than an hour-not counting the thought and research that went on before the actual writing.” 2 When students write, they express their feelings and ideas into a word, word into sentence, sentence into paragraph, and it needs hard thinking to produce it at the same time with good English grammatical. The knowledge of grammar is very important to experess what we would to say and interpret correctly, not only the basic meaning that someone said but also to force the utterance of piece of writing. Grammar keeps important role in writing. So, with a good grammar they can convey their message clearly, precisely, and easily to be understood by others. However, students, even English students, today still has problem in implementing the grammar usage in English. They are mostly assumed that the use of grammar, particularly in writing, make their mind stuck. Consequently, they can’t compose their writing into correct way or in flow manner or they continue to write without considering the error they produce. English grammar is more complicated than Indonesian grammar. Some mistakes are made when the students do not understand well about the English grammar. Many of the students commonly make grammar mistakes in their learning especially in writing, such as in tenses, there are no tenses in Indonesian language so many confuse in using the right tenses for their writing. For example, “Last holiday I go to Bandung” it should be “Last holiday I went to Bandung.” They make an error because they do not understand the grammar well. As the writer knows better, verb in English may have certain position which rules to tell the condition of time and to tell about the time of the action. This is, then, supported by Langan points of view 1 Maxine Hairston, Contemporary Composition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986, p. 8 2 James C Raymond, Writing is Unnatural Act, New York: Harper and Row Publisher, 1980, p. 7 3 that verb tells us the time of an action. The time that a verb shows is usually called tense. 3 Therefore, an error analysis has an important role to reveal what kinds of errors the students do most in writing and the cause of the error and how the students can learn from their mistakes in writing themselves. Thus, the students will not do the same thing or make some errors repeatedly. Although errors are bad things in learning English, error analysis is advantageous for both students and teachers. For students, error analysis is needed to show them in what aspect in grammar which is difficult for them, to show the errors made by the students, to know the resource or the cause of the error and how the students can learn from their mistakes in order that they will not make some errors repeatedly. And for teachers, it is required to evaluate themselves whether they are successful or not in teaching English. According to the English curriculum in Indonesia, Junior High School students have to master some types of writing paragraphs. Second year students specifically are expected to master three types of writing paragraphs. They are narrative, recount, and descriptive. Here the writer only used writing recount paragraph, because recount is more complicated than the other is. Recount functions to tell something that happened in the past and to tell a series of past event for the purpose of informing or entertaining. Based on the explanation above, the writer wants to know what kind of grammatical errors that is commonly made by the students. To find the answer, she does a field research in MTs N 8 Jakarta and makes a test concerning on error types of recount paragraph writing. Therefore, the title of this study is “An Analysis on Grammatical Errors in Students’ Recount Paragraph Writing ” A Case Study at Second Grade of Students MTs N 8 Jakarta. 3 John Langan, Sentence Skills, New York: McGraw Hill, 2003, p. 188 4

B. The Limitation of the Problem